During the past decade, the literature on the Carter
administration's foreign policy has grown rapidly, due largely to
both the release of new materials at the presidential library and
the attention Jimmy Carter has received since leaving the White
House. While previous monographs have focused on specific foreign
policy issues, Scott Kaufman breaks away from the mold and offers
this up-to-date, comprehensive look at Carter's aggregate foreign
policy record. Although many Americans regard Jimmy Carter as the
nation's greatest ex-president, Kaufman argues that the diplomatic
performance of the thirty-ninth president was mediocre, primarily
because of Carter's own doing. Carter, who entered office at a time
of transition, was determined to shift the direction of U.S.
foreign policy in a way that would downplay conflict between the
superpowers; to give more emphasis to North-South issues; and
generally to make the world a better place by curbing repression,
reducing arms sales, halting nuclear proliferation, ending
political and military conflicts abroad, and strengthening the
world economy. But, as crises developed abroad, the president
gradually assumed a diplomatic stance similar to that of his
predecessors, and ultimately his foreign policy boiled down to
containing the Soviet threat. Kaufman admits that Carter, like all
presidents, faced limitations in what he wanted to achieve,
including lawmakers or foreign officials who did not see eye-to-eye
with him. Despite difficulties, the president did have some
success: he achieved ratification of the Panama Canal treaties,
normalized relations with China, convinced Israel and Egypt to sign
the Camp David Accords and a peace agreement, and made human rights
a permanent component of U.S. diplomacy. Nonetheless, Kaufman
concludes that Carter's style of leadership caused his failures to
far outnumber his successes: Carter viewed himself as a political
outsider, attempted to achieve too much at once, failed to
prioritize initiatives or to understand the complexities involved
in achieving them, poorly handled intra-administration disputes,
and failed to give the nation a vision of the state in which he
wanted to leave the country by the end of his administration.
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